We were excited to find out this morning that we’ve been nominated for a Webby Award! POV’s website was nominated in the Movies and Film category — winners will be announced on May 6 and honored at a ceremony in New York on June 10. In the meantime, if you’d like, you can show your support by voting for POV in the People’s Voice Award Movies and Film category (registration required)! Check out our nominee page.
This is the third year in a row that POV has been nominated for a Webby. We’ve received a total of five nominations over the last five years, and in 2004, POV’s Borders | Environment won a Webby in the Broadband category.
During the 2007 season (for which we were nominated), we created a number of special features that we’re very proud of for our film websites. Here are some of our favorites.
Anthony Giacchino‘s The Camden 28 recalled a 1971 raid on a draft board office by Catholic Left activists protesting the Vietnam War. The website for the film featured transcripts of two of the most powerful testimonies at the Camden 28 trial, from the mother of one of the accused and from historian Howard Zinn. The transcripts were previously unavailable on the Internet, and we were pleased to make these historical documents accessible to more people.
For Michael Apted‘s 49 Up, the latest installment in a series of films that has profiled a group of English children every seven years, we created a photo gallery showing each participant growing older through the years. We also commissioned artists to create collages representing each of the seven years that the films were shot; the results were vivid and thought-provoking.
The Chances of the World Changing, by Eric Daniel Metzgar and Nell Carden Grey, dealt with the question of rescuing and preserving endangered animals through the story of one man, Richard Ogust, who shares his Manhattan loft with 1,200 turtles. For a special video for our Chances website, filmmaker Metzgar talked to George Amato, the director of conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, about the issues raised by the film. Metzgar and the film’s composer also talked extensively about the technical and artistic issues involved in collaborating on a soundtrack in our Production Journal.
Lumo, by Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, Nelson Walker III, co-directed by Louis Abelman and Lynn True, is the devastating and yet ultimately hopeful story of one young woman who was the victim of violent rape in the Congo. For our website for the film, we invited playwright and activist Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues to talk about the horrors of sexual violence and its aftermath in a special podcast interview.
Zach Nile and Banker White‘s Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars showcases a group of refugees fighting back with the only means they have — music. Since the film wrapped, the All Stars have become a force to be reckoned with in the music world, and for our website for the film, we teamed up with video-mixing website Eyespot.com to give fans and viewers the opportunity to mix and mash up footage from the film with the music of the All Stars to create their own music videos.
These are just some of the features we created for our film websites in the last year, and we couldn’t have done all this, and much more, without the support of the filmmakers we work with!
Congratulations also to our fellow public television producers over at ITVS and Frontline World. ITVS was nominated in the Best Games category for their excellent “World Without Oil” alternate reality game, and Frontline World was lauded for their amazing online videos, with a slew of nominations for Best Documentary Series and Individual Episode, Best News & Politics Series and Individual Episode. We’re thrilled to be in their company, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed for the announcement on May 6. In the meantime, don’t forget to vote for us in the People’s Voice Category. We’d really appreciate it!